Mechanical Design Business 1

[MattP]

Suppose a mechanical engineer (by degree and skills, not by license) wanted to do mechanical design and CAD work as an independent contractor for local industries. Could he or she do this legally as long as there were no engineering required such as engineering calculations? If this "designer" ran into a project that did require engineering, that he or she is capable of, could this be done and then have a licensed PE check over and approve?

(I had a similar question posted in another forum but it got nixed before I got any useful info. I don't know if it was because of the topic or because of the replies that I didn't get to see. I'm just looking for clarification.)

 

[RDK]

Lets start off then.

Canada is not a more expensive place than the US. I have traveled through a lot of the US and have several friends and work acquaintances there. I also have several older relatives who spend winters in various parts of the southwest US.

According to the hamburger index

http://www.oanda.com/products/bigmac/bigmac.shtml

Canadian purchasing power is about 21% above the US equivalent. Our dollar is worth around $0.75 US. Most goods in our stores are about the same number of dollars as they are in the US so they are in fact cheaper than in the US. Currently our dollar is rising compared to the US dollar so this difference is narrowing.

One major area that supports this is prescription drugs. There are several multi million dollar companies that exist solely to provide low cost drugs from the Canadian market to the US market.

We do have slightly higher taxes than the US on similar incomes and spending habits. However out tax bills include free health care for ALL Canadians. Nobody is denied health care in this country.

As far as being a P.Eng in Canada you have two options. The first and most common is to graduate from an accredited university, work for four years under other P.Eng’s and then become accepted to the profession. During the internship there is some mandatory professional development activities that have to occur as well as the requirement for at least three references. (The second method involves a series of 21(?) exams instead of the accredited degree and additional experience. I only know one person who got his P.Eng this way.)

The theory in Canada is that the scope of the profession is simply too broad to use exams as some sort of proxy for professional competence. In the US a lot of areas of the profession are not adequately covered by the exams. In the electrical field I have heard that the exams are geared towards power generation and transmission and virtually ignore the areas of low voltage and controls.

Also in Canada the term ‘collage’ usually refers to community collages. These are basically trade schools where one can take training to become carpenters, cooks, clerical etc. They also include engineering technologists. These are individuals trained in providing support services to engineers like drafting, survey, inspections etc. They are not allowed to practice engineering in any way shape or form. Never have and never will. If a technologist wants to be a P.Eng they can take the necessary courses (some universities have accelerated programs for technologists) and then get a degree and become engineering interns and eventually P.Eng’s.

The Canadian system relies instead on ones performance over 4 years of undergraduate experience and then four years of development under other engineers.

The US system relies far too heavily on your performance on two exams as a proxy for professional competence. If you are a good exam taker than you can be an engineer. The sample questions that I have seen are of the nature of how much water will flow in this pipe. The real world professional problem is to determine how much water you require to be transported, to generate options in how to transport it and finally with due regard for economic reliability and other factors pick a type of pipe, size of that pipe, length of pipe, grade of pipe etc to solve the problem.

I guess we will never agree on the validity of the industrial exemption. What I do see is that it allows for anyone regardless of competency, training and experience to call themselves engineers. All they need is someone to hire them. They can start their own company and be the head design engineer and start manufacturing products. There is no protection for the public except whatever liability insurance they have. If they have no insurance and no assets there is no public protection.

We may not have much more protection by virtue of requiring all engineers to be licensed, it does however provide something more than nothing.


Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[buzzp]

I want to address each one of your comments so hear it goes;
I have traveled to Canada on several occassions (I have relatives there) and I know first hand that, in general, items are way more expensive than the US (beer, cigarettes, motel rooms, etc, you know the important stuff). Maybe the taxes on these items are above normal so maybe not a fair comparison. However, others that travel their on a regular basis say this is not the case. Look at personal income tax. Sure you get free medical and maybe this all works itself out but I think the taxes are such that I could get three insurance policies for the amount of taxes coming out. (I pay around $240 for a family of four, including dental and vision).
As far as the prescription drug issue, I have to say the reason these drugs are cheaper is they are not FDA approved. Right or wrong, I dont know. I do know the drugs are way to expensive here but is laxing the requirements the solution? Depends on what they are.
You said "As far as being a P.Eng in Canada you have two options. The first and most common is to graduate from an accredited university, work for four years under other P.Eng’s and then become accepted to the profession. During the internship there is some mandatory professional development activities that have to occur as well as the requirement for at least three references." Yes, how is that different from what I said? Also, how is that better than the US? The US requires another exam. If there are no values in exams then throw your degree out the window because thats why you got it, you passed the tests. In the US you still have to work under a PE, same as Canada.
You said "The theory in Canada is that the scope of the profession is simply too broad to use exams as some sort of proxy for professional competence."
Whats the EIT test for then?
"In the US a lot of areas of the profession are not adequately covered by the exams. In the electrical field I have heard that the exams are geared towards power generation and transmission and virtually ignore the areas of low voltage and controls."
I have heard this too. This is also the case for the EIT exam. Why should a product design engineer care about transmission and distribution? Another problem with PE licensing.
I won't address the technologists degrees because I am in agreement with you on this. I am not an EET, I am an EE.
You said "The Canadian system relies instead on ones performance over 4 years of undergraduate experience and then four years of development under other engineers." The US has these same requirements in addition to another test. So if the Canadian system is better then by default does that mean the second test makes the system bad? I don't think so. That is simply illogical. We have the same requirements, time in job and everything in most states except Texas (that I know of).
As far as your last paragraph on the industrial exemption. I must say your comments here are simply wrong. There is probably more protection for consumers for 'products' than there is for work a consultant would do. You are wrong when you say "There is no protection for the public except whatever liability insurance they have. If they have no insurance and no assets there is no public protection." There is protection to the consumer. The product has been evaluated by a third party with no economic ties to the company (UL, CSA, TUV, NEMKO, etc). Remember seeing a CSA mark on almost anything electrical in Canada? Thats what the mark is for it is a reassurance the product is safe. On the PE side of things, technically only the interested party looks over the design. They all have economic ties to the decision to carry on with the design or not too.

Do you understand how a product gets from the design stage to market? While the product is being designed, consultation will be taking place with the end user and (consumer or another company) what ever agency the market requires an approval from and most of the time it is multiple agencies. When the product is prototyped, it is sent to one or more agencies (test houses) for a safety evaluation and in some cases a quality test to see if it does what it claims. They will expose the product to abnormal and normal conditions (high current, voltage, temperature, humidity, fire, etc) to determine the product is safe to use by the consumer. If it is not, it gets sent back for redesign or scrap. Now to top it all off, you have a customer that came to you (consumer or other company) with a set of requirements. If it is a company, they will generally request several samples for their own evaluation and often it will go through some of the same tests that the safety agency has done. So all in all, the "design" has went through a few different hands to assure its operation will be safe. To top it all off, a local inspector will come by and review the installation where this equipment is located. If he wants he can call the project. Now if the product does not do what it claims, people wont buy it and your companies reputation suffers (just like consultants). Now the way I see the consulting world, you may have peer reviews (done in product design world as well) and have to follow the local electrical code (just like a product designed for use where a local code is applicable). It seems to me their are way more checks to assure a safe product in the design world than their is in the consulting world. But thats just me. And this has been my stance all along that those that wish to make the PE license a requirement across the board simply do not understand engineering outside of their consulting world.

I better quit now before this post gets really long.

 

[GregLocock]

buzzp - is the PE exam technically harder than your engineering degree, or easier?

As to the value or otherwise of PEs in industry exempt products, my feeling is that where a long prototyping, optimising and testing phase is involved then we don't "design to code" so there is no point in having a chief code monster to sign the design off.

Since prototyping bridges etc is not valid they have to be designed to code (ie, suboptimally in an absolute sense), so somebody has to make sure that the codes have been followed. Hence a PE.

I suppose the way I'd characterise it is that a car is designed by successive optimisation so that it meets a final vehicle-level specification (and test), whereas a bridge is (partly) designed so that each detail is correct so that the final structure does not have to be completely tested.

I guess you either believe the Big Mac index or you don't. Economists and me do. As of April 2003 it indicated that the Canadian dollar could buy 18% more Big Macs locally than the US dollar.

http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1730909

I must admit I had not realised that the usual course for a Canadian PE did not involve more exams, in fact it sounds very similar to the UK's IMechE MPDS approach to chartership, whch seemed reasonable to me.



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[buzzp]

Well the red flag has spoken on my last post, right or wrong I dont know and dont care. Maybe I was out of line but it had to be said.

I am still waiting to hear why my summary of the Canadian system is wrong and still waiting to hear why the Canadian system is so much better than the US.

 

[ProEDesigner00]

Greetings.

I am glad to see that my involvment here has spured livly conversation all of which I am learning from. I am a designer and as acouple people mentioned about design cycles, I fill a niche (and all out here wanting to start this kind of business want to fill this niche) that the companies (customers) need ideas initial models and drawing information that they are not going to pay a higher dollered PE todo. In the end Mr. Dettmer had to change his name so he was not offering an engineering service. As a tool maker/designer and working in small shops in my past I have been asked to desing something to meet the goals at hand, built it and kept going. Some of these ideas were relegated by design reviews of the customers engineering staff, of whom the final stamp of aproval came from their resident tooling manager who was a guy about 56 yrs old coughing from to many cigerettes and had recieved his position by attrition. ( I not suggesting this is atypical of companies today but it sure is in alot of them) If it was tooling for in house use typically you are working with the company owner who is the type of person discribed above who was to ornery to work for someone else and had a good idea produced it and got lucky with some type of marketing then as his product niches died he had these machines setting around so he begines to sell tool design and manufacturing services.

I agree that end consumer products need the scrutiny of a design firm to let you know if it is going to be safe for the general public. To be a guy out here making models and creating drawings for companies with the abilities to disect what you present to them Why would I need to charge them for a service that they already have, by having to employ an in house PE?

Not to knock you folks with PE's but some of you dont want to the foot work needed to come up with an idea that comes across your desk for review. Besides I know very few PE's that WANTS to do all the design analasis and paper work required, have the ability to come up with a complex surface model that meets company standards for stability and robust modeling practices regardles of the software used. They know their talent is in the analizing the problem instead of producing good models and drawings. Isnt that why in the old board days you had Drafters?

Just my thoughts on this cool Thursday afternoon.

 

[Myndex]

I'd just like to chime in here a bit - regarding public safety.

How does *requireing* that design engineers have a PE to design low voltage consumer products help safety?

It doesn't. The mass of product coming into this country are engineered in China by sloppy cheap engineers that don't give a rat's ass.

I've been working on developing a few toys, as well as some other battery operated devices so I\'m fairly familiar with the market, and I have to say I am absolutely appalled by the crap being imported - one toy I found was made from a brittle acrylic that would shatter in a kids face when struck. Making all U.S. designers have a PE won't help that situation.

You don't need a PE to know how to follow good design practices, such as not using a brittle plastic when a polycarbonite is called for. And you certainly don't need a PE to design a keychain flashlight. I don't think you can "prove" that being a PE is as important as being diligent in these areas.

On the other hand, doing FEA on a roller coaster and certifying it's safety falls entirely in the hands of a PE.

So where do you want to draw the line? Should glass blowers be required to have a PE? I mean, they are creating consumer products that could break and cut someone, right? What about retail package designers? I mean, they make cardboard packages, and gosh, some consumer might get a paper cut on one.

Get real, Mr Canada man. It's ludicrous to think that every designer in the world need to have a PE. Definitely in situations where stress testing, FEA, and other direct safety related certification is required. But not for general design work, and not by a long shot.


Regards,


Andy

 

[737eng]

Slightly changing the subject. I work in the airline industry, which does not require a P.E. stamp for any type of Engineering approval. However, the Engineering data does have to show compliance with the current federal regulations and be approved by the FAA. The FAA designates certain engineers (Designated Engineering Representitives or DER's) with the authority to show compliance and approve this data. I am a DER with a delegation in structures and therefore can find compliance and approve structural repairs and modifications on aircraft. Should I need a P.E. or a P.E. on staff to sell my services?

 

[GregLocock]

To sell your services to airlines? No. To sell your servives to the general public, yes. To sell your services to a member of the general public who has had past dealings with the FAA - grey area.

Remember they are basically looking for who to sue when the design is defective, so clueless customers get protected by legally having to go to PEs, companies that should know better get to decide for themselves. I'm not too sure what that says about architects?



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[ProEDesigner00]

Gentlemen

An update. I have reconfigured a product that is "old technology" and want to offer it for sale to the public. My initial sales to the public are to a sect of people whom cannot sue. I am sensing however from this conversation that before I can sell to others in the general public that I do have to have a seal of aproval from a P.E. My product will need a UL rating and have to meet EPA approval where applicable. Is the UL listing the same as a PE stamp of approval?

Norb.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

I would LOVE to know what sect of people exists out there that cannot sue!


Dan
Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[buzzp]

In general, if your selling a product through a company (your company), you do not need a PE to sign the drawings, end of discussion.

 

[ProEDesigner00]

Macgyvers2000
The Amish cannot sue. It is against their religeous beliefs. Once you get to know a few of them and gain their trust they are the most honest people there are. and boy can they negotiate a deal.

Thanks buzzp However liability is my next area of understanding I need clarified.
Norb

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Well, as an electrical engineer, I can't really imagine a product that would hit it big in the Amish market for me, regardless of the product's safety.


Dan
Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[buzzp]

Your company is liable for the design. Yes you can be sued. Of course, my experience is only as an EE. There are third party safety agencies which will certify to the safety (fire) of your device such as UL and CSA. Getting your product approved by these agencies is voluntary. However, the market often necessitates getting approval from one of these (at least in the US) (customer likely require one or the other). By getting one of these guys to approve your design for safety should greatly reduce your liability should something happen (within your equipment) to start a fire. Of course there is no guarantee but you are showing due diligence. Also, I would definately incorporate right away or at least go for an LLC to limit your personal liability.
I do not recall any agencies which handle strictly mechanical designs as far as safety approvals in the US (but suppose strictly mechanical designs, no electrical, or becoming more and more rare). The Europeans have the CE mark which does include machinery directives for safety. VDE might be another mark which has machine safety addressed.

 

[EddyC]

MattP,

Generally, if you are an independent business entity and you do engineering and your product is a set of drawings (hard copy or electronic), then you need a PE. "Engineering" can be many things and not just design activities that require calculations. Many things are engineered with only partial calcs or even no calcs at all. To me, if someone hands you a hard drawn sketch and tells you to make a CAD model, that is drafting. But if you create something from scatch or make a modification to an existing design on your own initiative, that is engineering. Be advised that many states require that a PE be in charge of any work that they approve. They are not always allowed to review the work of others and approve it. It all depends on the particular state in question. As you have noticed from the discussions on this forum, the laws that regulate engineering are a patchwork quilt and are not readily interpreted. I meet people and companies who perform engineering in violation of state licensing laws. Even though it occurs, it is wrong and don't do it!

 

[Tobalcane]

Hi guys…

I have read somewhere that (for consultants like scientist and such that do B to B) that you have the customer sign a waiver (paraphrasing) that indicates that you are not in charge of the designs and the customer is taking the design in good faith and is responsible for all actions against the designs. Can this put you in the clear?

Just curious…


Go Mechanical Engineering
Tobalcane